A danish in one hand, coffee in the other
by mayhit
Summary: October first. She has red hair. You can't seem to catch your breath.


**Title: A Danish in one hand, coffee in the other.**

**Segment: October first. She has red hair. You can't seem to catch your breath.**

**Description: Vaughn and Sydney meet. Feelings and thoughts are stirred.**

**Rating: PG (Wow this is tame!)**

**Disclaimer: I posses nothing. Not even Sark… Damn it.**

**Author's notes: this came directly from my first fic ever, "Kaleidoscope Girl" as a rewrite. My old work sucks. This is much different. Also, this is some seriously old stuff. The show was so different then! This be the lane of memories.**

**Feed back: Yes please.**

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You remind yourself: "Michael Vaughn". Three syllables, thirteen letters and a scrabble value of 27 though if asked you'd deny it. Say, "I was just curious so I Googled it." Smile.

A drinking game last July and no, that wasn't the time you cheated at scrabble and hid the Z up your sleeve. No, Weiss didn't con you into French kissing Alice for his Independence Day video- no.

Vaughn has only one syllable, six letters and a scrabble value of 13. (Bad luck).

You think its because the CIA so rarely has walk-ins.

Paged twice before you finally put down the Laugerfield report and see Haladki calling you from his office across the hall. "Vaughn, new case. I'd be careful if I were you."

"Yeah, well you're not me." and when you put the receiver down it's a sad fact that hanging up on a brownnoser has been the most fulfilling part of your day. Haladki and his over identification issues. Serving the United States of America has been a real blast.

"No Mike, I think the problem is there hasn't been _enough _blast."

You and Eric and a bottle of Tequila while Alice was out of town. Feeding Donovan Cheetoes until he threw up on the carpet and it's a good thing Eric's video camera was not there for the morning after because rumors of, _"Bill Vaughn's kid really likes his schnapps,"_ is not what you need. "The only time we've gotten _any_ blast was in that detonation seminar and who gives a damn about an ounce and a half of plastics?"

You had tried to read the dictionary ("Recruitment: defined as staffing, enrollment, con-fucking-scription") but Weiss spilt brandy on the pages and for once you wanted to get too pissed to remember you were supposed to be the one with potential.

When Sydney Bristow shows up in your office you've got a Danish in one hand, coffee in the other. She may as well have a sign above her head claiming, "fulfillment of thus-far-useless potential here." She has red hair.

You remind yourself: "Michael Vaughn". You have a pen in your suit pocket. She asks for it like she knows you have it, slides her eyes into the dark crevice of receding fabric and waits for your hands to catch up with her demands. _"Find the pen- give her the pen damn it."_

In grade seven you were the only twelve year old on the elementary school running team. "Jeff Weathers is good," said the coach. 68 hours before the race- you were counting down by minutes though. Windy Tuesday- you could smell the clean chilled sweat blown in droplets from the hair of the older boys. "He's got speed galore Son, but you- you've got determination. That and a healthy pair a lungs."

68 hours, two minutes and a bunch of pounding seconds. One small metal baton passing from your hand to his and you'll never know who dropped it first. The hollow pipe whistled to the ground.

Jeffery weathers told all his friends it was your fault and they stole your lunches for a week. You told all your friends it was your fault and you cried behind an oak tree once the race was finished. You told Janey Bolts who saw you at it that you were just catching your breath- as though it would excuse your scalded salty face. Gasping shudders-

_Come on Son! Put those lungs to work!_

Weiss leaves the room in silence. Weiss the comedian. The friend who makes the other men look better- 'Fumble Man'. _Thank you, I'll be here all week._ Ba dum bum. You pass Sydney Bristow the pen and wonder what it's like to be him.

"_This pen,"_ you think, _"will be the first thing I ever give her."_ black pen, black baton, black ribbon for, "Honorable Participation!"

All those years of cross-country and you're right back to the seventh grade. Your hands shake and of course she feels it. You curse the Respiratory system and can't breathe. Her hair is red.

Sixteen minutes later (you've been counting them down) there's a picture on the desk in your office.

_You and Alice smiling. Alice in a blue and white sun dress- party hat askew. You wear your red shirt and kiss ice cream into her mouth on the beach. Eric gets it on camera. You watch the fireworks with your toes in the cooling sand. No one talks about liberty- like the ocean in California, you are surrounded by it and there are really no words for adequately expressing belief._

The office the CIA gave you was small- like three thousand other small offices. You measured it once during lunch hour: ten by twelve. The office the CIA gave you next was bigger and identical to two thousand other bigger offices. Haladki has one just like it.

The director sent men to move your things on July third; the day before the picture was taken. When you see Sydney Bristow's shock of neon seated in your chair you turn the photograph away.

If asked why, you wouldn't know the answer. Whether to partner or to country you figure it comes down to a lack of faith.

You tell yourself, _"This woman is a crazy person."_ Sydney, daughter of Jack, daughter of a mother who must have looked more dangerous than she was... or maybe that one's backwards. Despite her attempt to be benign, she broke the led of three task force pencils before moving on to pens. The weakness of heavy metal and "_There's too much pressure in this girl." _She has blood on her lips like the color of Koolaid.

"Tell me Sydney, is that blood yours?"

Arvin Sloane will ask her an hour's worth of questions in thirty seconds and let her go home with her wave to Dixon and her box of hair dye waiting in the car. Sloane would kill her if he knew she was here. Having never met Sloane you spend a moment reading him from her skin…

A scar on her left elbow where a Russian security agent had a knife and back up wasn't there. A burn mark where the bullet grazed her neck ("You know Sydney, I've felt that same revelatory state that you're feeling right now.") and three too few molars- that look in her eye that arrived with their departure: _"If you hurt me you'd better make it count."_

It makes you feel a little bit sick or something. The compensation in a girl's eyes, lips tongue- one too many times the person on the other end of a two way radio had the volume up too loud and now, when a door bangs she ducks, narrows her eyes, you bite off some remark about Tolstoy and she bites her tongue.

Stray cats don't go through in a year what this girl's been through in a day. _Too much poison here, they hide it between bits of flesh and bone._

If, somehow she makes it all look good, then it isn't for you to consider. You can just hear Jack: _"Not all agents have the privilege of a desk job, Mr. Vaughn. Try to be of some use to her… if you can."_

Can just hear Haladki: _"a bit of a loose canon if you ask me." (I didn't ask you.)_

Can just hear Weiss: _"Mike, buddy- I think this is over your head,"_ pouring the Captain Morgan's into a tumbler, _"No wait, actually I think it's over both of our heads," _deciding against using mixer, _"I mean if I stood on the bottom of the lake and held your ankles we wouldn't even be able to-"_ you leave the room before he finishes. You don't bring the tumbler. As much as you hate to admit it, most of what Jack said was correct.

"_Try to be of some use to her."_

It was the hidden desperation in his jaw that made you force your hands into your pockets and brush past him. Jack and his daughter like a car crash- you don't want to look. Humans are such perverse creatures; you are nearly always starved for the sight of disaster.

Two boys scrambling on the dusty track. The larger boy pushes the smaller boy out of the way and when he stands it is with a baton in his angry fist. The crowd looks on at the spectacle. _Survey shows: eighty percent of that crowd was watchin' you kid. You're a star. _

Janey bolts can't stop staring at the scratch on your shoulder where Jeffery pushed you up against the rough cement wall of the grand stands. That's okay; you can't stop starring at the scab on her ear. "My hoop earring caught on my sweater," you heard her tell her friends. Janey doesn't wear hoop earrings.

She motions you into the 'Handy-Cap' bathroom and locks the door. "They always have a medical kit in these ones," she says and rips the tidy red and white box off the wall. You sit side by side on the gross wet counter and you can feel Janey's hands going _dab dab dab_ with the ball of cotton gauze and disinfectant.

After a moment her motions begin to slow until eventually, her hand settles on your shoulder and doesn't move (accept for the shaking). You turn to face her and her fingers quickly curl away from you onto the counter laminate. "You don't have to help me, you know. I can… take care of myself."

She fidgets with her dangling legs and carefully tucks her hair behind her ear, exposing a scar that is a centimeter long, purple black, more furious than a child of only twelve has words for. You reach out and touch her ear lobe lightly with your fingers, tracing the half shell of pale flesh the way you remember your father doing with his diary: _fingers along the gold plated pages. "Gentle, gentle, words can be fragile Michael. Truth can be very fragile."_

"I need to worry about you," says Janey Bolts, "because it's easier than worrying about me." Your first kiss tastes like antiseptic ointment. You think you are both quite young to be putting your tongues in each other's mouths. "But then," you consider, "Janey Bolts is quite young to be beaten by her step father." And like math equations, ("Nothing but addition and subtraction, Michael.") you hope that one may rectify the other.

Twenty years later- in an office that designates your worth to the United States of America by square feet- you tell Sydney Bristow, "it would be good to have another double agent inside SD-6."

A girl with terrorism written over her limbs in cuts and bruises. _Like a child with finger paints got loose on her walls of skin. _Sydney's got a cut between her third and fourth toe and a chipped Lunate bone. You find it disgusting, the idea that a man across the globe has placed his handprint on her arm and gripped until it won't come off the skin. That a man once beat Janey Bolt's mother with her own curling iron and all Janey could do was whisper, brokenly into the folds of your sweater, "it was still hot."

"It was _still hot_."

In your office Sydney Bristow refuses your help. Rolls the stiffness out of her shoulders and spits, "because you said _another_,"

Says, "My bet is you don't"

Says, "I'm alright." And means, "You're only worth 168 square feet to your own government. Why should I trust you?"

"How great is that?" Said Weiss into a wedge of lime. He had shown up at your door with a forty under his arm and a mesh bag of citrus fruit. "The last thing that blew up around here was a pizza pocket. Even the terrorists don't want us to get any play."

Sydney Bristow's got a dead fiancée and an apartment full of half packed boxes. She fills her mouth with salt water to keep the infection from starting and struggles with the salt that's already behind her eyes. She leaves his office with his pen in her hands, thinking about the significance of a floating red ball in a basement across the world.

"Jeff Weathers is good," said coach Marshal, "but you- you've got determination. That and a healthy pair a lungs." You'd like to amend Marshal's statement:

October first. She has red hair. You can't seem to catch your breath.


End file.
